When the stars, the directors, the actors and the actresses have stepped out of their limousines in front of the Festival Palace in Cannes and have made their way through the cheering crowds, when they have survived the frenzy of hundreds of flashing cameras and have climbed the steps to the palace, they have only a few more meters to go before reaching the hallowed halls of cinema. They will have almost made it.
But there is still one man left to pass: Gilles Jacob.
Jacob has been in charge of the festival for more than 30 years and stands at the top of the stairway every evening, perhaps the most famous stairway of the modern age, the stairway to fame.
He stands there dressed in a tuxedo, looking very slim and erect, and runs his gaze across the crowd, across the stars below. It is the exacting gaze of a patriarch, proudly observing what he has created.
"The steps are a religious metaphor," says Jacob, 80. "At the festivals in both Venice and Berlin, the entrance to the theater where the premiers are played is at ground level, as it is at the Oscars. Only here in Cannes do people have to climb a stairway, going higher and higher."
The Danish director Lars von Trier allegedly said: When you have climbed the steps in Cannes and have finally made it to the top, you've arrived in paradise -- or not.
'When God Calls, You Have to Come Immediately'
"People always ask: What do you think about up there?" says Jacob. "About the friendships with the filmmakers who are climbing the steps up to where you are? Or do you have erotic fantasies when the actresses climb those steps? The truth is that I'm thinking of only one thing: Can we start on time? When God calls you to him, you have to come immediately. But it's a little different when I call."
But these days the actors and directors whom Gilles Jacob and his artistic director, Thierry Frémaux summon to Cannes -- a group including such luminaries this year as Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Brad Pitt, Jodie Foster, Pedro Almodóvar and Nanni Moretti -- make a concerted effort to arrive on time.
Even those who don't consider Jacob to be a deity know that he is the doorman at an extremely exclusive cinema club.
Today, as one of the most powerful men in European film, Jacob can afford to leave the task of choosing the competition films -- 20 out of some 1,700 submitted -- to Frémaux. But as the president of the festival, Jacob keeps a close eye on the empire, which he has steadily expanded since taking office as program director in 1978.
Year after year the festival, with more than 4,000 accredited journalists in attendance and several hundred TV crews filming along the entire length of the opulent Promenade de la Croisette 24 hours a day, is one of the world's biggest cultural events.
Saving 10 Years for Tarantino
Jacob turned Cannes into a global village for the first time in 1979, when he drummed up 1,100 journalists to attend the press conference for Francis Ford Coppola's war film "Apocalypse Now." In the ensuing decades, Jacob discovered directors like Jane Campion, Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke. He promoted Quentin Tarantino by showing his debut film "Reservoir Dogs" in 1992, and helped him achieve a breakthrough by including "Pulp Fiction" in the competition in 1994. Jacob saved me 10 hard years of my life, says Tarantino.
In 1992, he opened the festival with Sharon Stone's "Basic Instinct" and celebrated the actress, who had had little success until then, as the new sex goddess.
Stone is still treated like a major star in Cannes today, though she hasn't been one for a long time, as few have watched the films she made after "Basic Instinct." But her Cannes appearances brought Stone lucrative contracts with French cosmetics companies that support the festival. When Stone collects donations for her AIDS foundation in Cannes, she routinely raises millions.
"A few years ago, I took a picture of Sharon Stone as she walked across the red carpet and climbed the stairs to where I was standing. She looked completely surprised to see me standing there with a camera, and yet she was smiling confidently." As Jacob tells this story, he clearly seems pleased that Stone satisfies his standards for a modern star.
High Art Versus Box Office Returns
Jacob created an anti-Hollywood, a cinematographic-industrial complex that produces its own stars -- which explains why the Los Angeles studio heads have rarely spoken highly of him.
My relationship with Gilles Jacob mirrors French-American relations, American producer Harvey Weinstein ("Chicago," "The King's Speech") said in 2003, after US troops had invaded Iraq and many Americans were referring to French Fries as "Freedom Fries."
For some people it's easier to win the Palm d'Or than to win over audiences, the US trade publication Variety wrote. Before you get involved with the festival, Sony manager Paul Allen once said, you first hold a gun to your head and ask yourself if this what you really want.
The idea that there was suddenly a player on the other side of the Atlantic, and a Frenchman to boot, who had the audacity to play along in the big movie business, without investing a single cent of his own money, was simply incomprehensible.
The Americans could never understand that Cannes does not function according to the usual market economy principles, and that it's not a democracy but a monarchy -- a representative monarchy, of course, with King Gilles on the throne.
No Broader Appeal
This year French First Lady Carla Bruni will walk up the steps to see Jacob at the top, and he will greet her respectfully. Bruni has a minor role in Woody Allen's film, which kicks off this year's festival. Cannes is a state within a state.
But many films that were honored in Cannes over the years never gained a broader appeal. "There is only a limited audience for awkward films," says Jacob. "Every major exhibition in Paris is several times as popular. Cinephilia, or the passionate love of the cinema, is a vanishing entity within the general audience."
In the world of cinephiles, it isn't the commercial potential of a film that matters but the artistic handwriting of the directors. Cannes is a Mecca for the so-called "cinéma des auteurs." But what is an auteur film?
"An 'auteur,'" says Jacob, "creates a universe of its own, just like an author who writes book after book. He can make mistakes and shoot bad films. At the same time, this definition is idiotic. Many great 'auteurs' have made films that have hardly anything in common."
That's because the "auteur" celebrated in Cannes every year is a grand illusion. The notion that an individual could shape a film through and through within the complex, often industrial form of production we call the cinema is appealing but unrealistic. "An 'auteur,'" Jacob himself admits, "is someone who assembles his team perfectly. In this sense, the director's individual artistic achievement is perhaps overestimated."
Prevailing Against the Charms of Cannes
Nevertheless, Cannes under the aegis of Jacob has always been more likely to show the mediocre works of recognized directors, such as Wim Winders' "The End of Violence," Lars von Triers' "Antichrist" and Almodóvar's "Broken Embraces," than the outstanding films of unknown talents. Jacob and Frémaux have systematically pursued the Cannes-onization of the arthouse film. Put differently, Cannes has remained true to its heroes, even in their times of weakness.
"Great artists are often highly intelligent," says Jacob. "And highly intelligent people are often crazy. In other words, one is moving from the universe of one lunatic to the universe of another lunatic! It's enough to drive you nuts."
During the viewings in Paris, when the members of the selection committee watch four or five films in a row, they often end up shouting at each other by the end of the day, says Jacob. "Their nerves are raw, and the tension is often enormous. One of the reasons is that in Paris, unlike Cannes, we cannot step out into the sun and walk under the palm trees between films." There is probably no other place like Cannes, says Jacob, where audiences can endure so much suffering on the screen.
Mindful of this effect, Jacob has gradually transformed the festival into a place of reverse escapism. While millions of people around the globe go to the movies every day to be distracted from the hardships of their daily lives, the rich and the beautiful in Cannes stroll from the Croisette into the palace to watch countless social dramas that address the problems of the less fortunate.
Some would call this obscene, a sort of cinematic slum tourism. "Cannes is a difficult test for any film," says Jacob, "because you can also lie on the beach, go out to eat or get up and go to a different cinema. Each film must prevail against the possibilities Cannes has to offer, which isn't easy."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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